A journey to search my soul

This is a blog of my personal collections. The purpose of this blog is to educate myself and public in regards to antiquities especially related to religion and calligraphy. I welcome everyone to input their feedback in this blog which they think would be helpful. I do not watermark the photos in this blog so everyone is free to use them as long as they are not used for illegal and unethical reasons. I appreciate if you could notify me if you plan to use any of the photos here. Enjoy browsing!!

Monday, November 2, 2015

These are 2 follios from Mongolia Buddha Sutra. The thing that make these follios attractive to me is the usage of Syriac-resemblance script in most of Mongolia manuscripts.
Unlike Aramaic or Syriac script which is written from right to left, the Uighur script is written from top to bottom adapting the way Chinese scripts are written and read.

See below an excerpt from Linguamongolia website :

The Mongolian (Uighur) Script

Over
the last 800 years Mongolian has been written with a variety of
different scripts, but the first of those and the most enduring is the
one which the Mongols borrowed from the Uighurs. The Uighurs themselves
had acquired this script as a result of their contacts with the
Sogdian's, an Old Iranian people who had in turn borrowed their script
from Syriac. Those who are already familiar with Syriac will easily see
the similarities. However, where Syriac and Sogdian were written
horizontally right to left, Uighur and Mongolian are written vertically
left to right. According to Mongol tradition, this script was instituted
at the order of Chinggis Qaghan in 1204. Many attempts were made to
supplant it, with various scripts, mainly under the influence of Tibetan
Buddhism and several scripts were adopted as variations of Tibetan and
Sanskrit. The old script was eventually abandoned in the former
Mongolian People's Republic where, in 1941, it was replaced by a
variation of the Cyrillic alphabet. This loss of status has extremely
weakened its position in Outer Mongolia, where generations have now
grown up knowing nothing but Cyrillic; there have been attempts to
revive its use, but these have not been overly successful.
However, it
is still used by a relatively large section of the Mongolians living in
the Inner Mongolia autonomous region of China, where the script can be
found everywhere including bilingual road signs and on almost every
storefront and fast-food outlet